W.H. launches Israel P.R. offensive

The White House is engaged in an aggressive effort to reassure Jewish leaders that the tense relationship between the Obama administration and the Israeli government that has played out in public in the past few months does not signify any fundamental change in U.S. policy.

Concern within the administration over the domestic repercussions of the recent clashes with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government reached a critical point about 10 days ago, as Israel was about to mark its 62nd year of independence.

Story Continued Below

Since then, administration officials have mounted what amounts to a public relations blitz trying to rectify what they have come to believe is largely a perception problem that Obama is being unreasonably tough or even hostile to Israel — not a substantive disagreement over its Middle East policies.

There is some evidence the reassurances are working: AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, issued a statement Friday saying that the president and “top members of his administration and senior military leaders have highlighted the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship and reaffirmed that a strong and secure Israel advances U.S. national security interests.”

But the dimensions of Obama’s public relations problems were made plain Thursday by the criticism New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, one of the administration’s closest allies, leveled at the president. Obama’s tough tone on Israel is “counterproductive,” Schumer said. “This has to stop.”

Schumer, appearing on the politically conservative Jewish Nachum Segal Show, said he had called White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel threatening to “blast” the administration unless the State Department backed down from suggesting that Netanyahu needed to demonstrate his commitment to achieving peace.

Another spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said there has been no special effort recently to reach out to American Jews. “We’ve always talked about our unwavering commitment to Israel’s security,” he said. “There’s nothing new there. We’ve been consistent in our rhetoric.

But one former Democratic official said there has been disagreement within the administration about how to deal with the fallout from Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Israel and Netanyahu’s recent visit here. Those arguing for aggressive outreach “have finally broken through to the White House, which now understands and accepts that there will be no movement on the policy without [better] public relations.”

“What happened here, is they came to a moment of truth about 10 days, two weeks ago, ‘we have failed,’” the former Democratic official continued. “’Our Middle East policy and posture is in chaos, is in failure, and there is no way to ignore it. And therefore, what do we do about it?’ And they decided, we need to change the posture. They realized they were going down a bad path. So they launched a PR campaign — a blitz — entirely to support the policy.”